Increasingly, insurance companies/providers allow customers to obtain quotes for insurance policy premiums via the Internet. To obtain an on-line quote, a customer typically visits the insurance company web site and accesses an on-line form to enter information needed to calculate the appropriate premium amount (e.g., information about a property being insured and/or information about the customer). The customer may also select various coverage levels, such as limits and deductibles for different types of coverage (e.g., for auto insurance, a limit for bodily injury liability, a limit for property damage liability, a comprehensive deductible, a collision deductible, etc.), after which a premium for the selected combination of coverage levels is displayed to the customer.
Often, however, customers may wish to see how the policy premium will be impacted as various coverage levels are changed. Thus, a customer may manually select a first coverage combination (set of coverage levels) and view the premium for such a policy. After which, the customer may select a different, second coverage combination (e.g., by adjusting one or more deductibles and/or coverage limits), and then view the new premium for that policy.
Unfortunately, the process of using conventional on-line quote tools with a large number of options may be ponderous and time consuming, and may generally result in a poor user experience for customers. For example, interacting with numerous drop-down menus or pop-up windows to select different coverage levels may cause the customer to quickly lose track of the context associated with a currently displayed premium and coverage combination. In particular, the customer may forget how the currently selected coverage combination relates to his or her coverage under a current policy, forget how the currently selected coverage combination relates to the full range of available coverage options, and so on. This may cause customer confusion and/or make the customer less certain as to the desirability of a particular coverage combination, cause customer frustration, and/or generally reduce the benefit that the on-line tools provide to the customer.